Word: gnostic
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...best Hesse writes with diamantine clarity-not about the psychological self in current fashion, but about the metaphysical self of traditional contemplation. Hesse is not a conventional Christian; he does not believe he can be saved by belief in a god outside himself. He is a Gnostic; he believes he can be saved by experience of a god within himself. To Hesse the self is the end and all of living and man is the measure of all things-or would be, as he suggests ironically, if man could only devise some way to measure...
...church's attack on contraception, Noonan says, must be seen in its historic context, as a response to a particular challenge. In the first two centuries of Christian history, church leaders were forced to defend the value of procreation against Manichaeans and Gnostic heretics who saw in the Biblical counsels about virginity a commandment to abstain from sex entirely. Christians also had to defend the sanctity of life against a pagan Rome that accepted both abortion and contraception as a way of life...
...Compared with the chronological accounts of Jesus' life in Mark or Luke, The Gospel of Philip is not a Gospel at all, and deserves no place in the New Testament canon. In form it is a rambling, epigrammatic sermon or epistle on certain Christian teachings, interpreted from a Gnostic viewpoint. Composed about the middle of the 2nd century, the Gospel could not have been written by Philip the Apostle, who is recorded in John as one of the first disciples gathered by Jesus and as an onlooker at the miracle of the loaves and fishes. In stead, following...
...Brooklyn brick; to find in the moral slime of a slum episode the ink in which to write Greek tragedy as it was written in the golden age. Inevitably, the attempt fails; but the failure is impressive. The film, perhaps even more vividly than the play, demonstrates the Gnostic precept that when the seven deadly sins are counted, there is still one more. Its name is Ignorance, and it is as quick as any other to send a soul to hell...
Named for the 3rd century Babylonian Gnostic Mani, who taught that the Creator is an evil being opposed to the good God, Manichaeans viewed the world as bad and salvation as escape from it. Modern Manichaeans are those whose hunger for the spiritual leads them to disdain the material; they try to make the leap of faith without having their feet planted firmly on the ground...